We, the good people of 21st century America, are a people who stand among one-another at arm’s distance. (We did not need a pandemic to make it literally so.) We are also a people who did not need a January 6 insurrection to come to view half of our very own population as the other.
And that speaks only to the connective tissue between human beings. The distance to the rest of the Earth’s living creation is out of sight and touch.
Despite Native Hawaiians narrating their own history (in daily opposition to the colonial missionary version) – still here, even on Hawai’i, even now, when these disempowered indigenous are reclaiming voice – so few of us have reached out to understand. Or to pry open our ears and hear the deeply-felt emotional, cultural, and historical kinship these people live and breathe with their distant Polynesian cousins. Or what that even means.
What It Means
The kindred Māori in New Zealand and the Native peoples across the scattered Islands of the Pacific repeat still the chant that returns them to the place of their birth. That place is at the mouth of the Wailua River on Kaua’i.
The chant is their repetition of the ancient celestial map plotted by their ancestors on their first journey from that birthing place to the, then uninhabited, islands of the Pacific Ocean.
Perhaps 13,000 years ago, maybe longer, those ancient kanaka maoli (original people) journeyed in their sophisticated voyaging canoes west and south into the unknown – away from “home,” away from Lahui (the original name of Hawai’i).
The chant - tracking stars, ocean currents, birds and tiny land masses that they passed – became, when reversed, their ticket “home.” But home may not have been that particular voyager’s destiny. His purpose was perhaps discovery and populating. The return trip may have awaited generations.
In those subsequent generations, the chant with the promise of home – of source, nurture, and knowing at the journey’s end - was passed orally from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart.
Let us remind ourselves – we moderns who vest our deepest faith in words written across a page - that the reliability of the oral transmission was not a game of “Telephone,” where passed words are garbled by the end of the transmitting line.
These stories, these chants were sacred. There were men and women whose life’s singular purpose was to learn that transmission over half a lifetime at the knee of an elder, and when they had become that elder, passing it on.
And so, over many thousands of years, the Māori in New Zealand, some 3,830 nautical miles from Kaua’i, embraced and repeated that ancient chant that would take them “home.”
Listening to Truth
That was the story that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani told me twenty-five years ago, when it seemed no one was listening. But as our good Earth and its people begin to acknowledge the level of our own complicity in the destruction of our planet – some begin to attend to the indigenous wisdom. One never knows these days exactly where they might encounter it.
This week, it was in Home Depot. ‘Iokepa and I were searching for a simple water sprinkler for our thirsty 60 plus baby papaya trees outside of the reach of our irrigation. I asked for help, and the help came in the form of another very handsome Native Hawaiian of our vintage. He and ‘Iokepa recognized one another and, sprinkler forgotten, the real conversation began.
Our friend had traveled to New Zealand, Together, Akana and ‘Iokepa recounted their shared lineage and defining cultural values: the giving and receiving being a singular, circular motion; their responsibility for openness to every living aspect of Creation. And, naturally they spoke of the chant that connects.
Akana said, “There is also a Wailua River in New Zealand. The Māori say there is a volcanic tunnel that connects theirs and ours.”
‘Iokepa and I loved the insight, a new one to us – volcanic tunnels being so ubiquitous on our Islands. We laughed and agreed in principle to the real possibility.
But when we were alone, ‘Iokepa said, “I don’t need to see the existence of that tunnel. I feel it. I treasure Akana’s story for the power of that metaphor. Our connection is indestructible.”
These indigenous people embrace genealogy; they sanctify connection. Traveling in a strange city, a Polynesian face pumping gas, or a Polynesian name on a sign is an invitation to find the family’s connection to your own. And given that all of their shared ancestry started at the mouth of the Wailua River on Kaua’i, they will invariably find it.
In a modern American world. we are obsessed with defining the other – crystalizing the differences that alienate us from even those we’re born related to. It’s a cold world that shrinks the meaning of family to the nuclear - and still excludes.
These indigenous people have a word too often translated by foreigners to mean just “family.” The word, instead, is a culturally-defining word: “ohana.” It means: “Everything you see that you can wrap your heart around, is your responsibility to take care of.”
The tunnel, that perhaps elusive volcanic tunnel connecting two Wailua Rivers 3820 nautical miles distant, speaks louder than I can manage here. Perhaps it’s the much-needed (literal or metaphoric) reminder. And maybe, just maybe, our 21st century answers require only listening a little bit harder. I think it might be time to go home.